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Greetings everyone, I'm creating this thread/topic to provide a place for anyone who wants to to introduce themselves. If you don't want to you don't need to feel any pressure to. I'll give a short introduction to who I am for those who don't know me already. I grew up in Canada in a Protestant Evangelical setting. I had a pretty normal understanding of Christianity for that context. In about 2002, shortly after getting married, my wife and I started to be challenged by some things in the New Testament that didn't fit well with our theology and caused us to start to reevaluate our lives. That led us on a somewhat lonely journey for a few years where we couldn't find fellowship anymore in the places we had once called home (in a spiritual sense). We ended up moving for a while to Mexico to live with a missionary who was going through a similar transition to us. He had been challenged by the early Christian writings from after the New Testament. He encouraged me to read a book about some of the ways the early Christian understanding was different than what I had grown up with. Some of it made sense with what I was already seeing in scripture and some of it challenged my thinking. It got me interested in reading the early Christian writings for myself. As I read the early Christian writings I found a mixed bag. Some of it (especially the stuff from the first and earlier second centuries) encouraged me to take Jesus and his teachings more seriously. Some of it (especially some stuff after the second century) made me feel like the early Christians started to drift away from the simplicity of Jesus's teachings over time. However, one thing I could clearly see is that what I had grown up with wasn't the same thing as what the early Christians lived and understood Christianity to be. If anyone is interested, I've collected a number of longer quotes from the early Christian writings in the 1st and 2nd centuries that I have appreciated and that I think illustrate just how different early Christianity was than much of what is the case today. You can find that here: https://www.xpian.info/earlysummariesofchristianity.html I currently live in Haiti with my wife and 11 of my 12 living children (my oldest is living in Canada). I'm working with some others on a project to make the early Christian writings which aren't in the New Testament more easily available for free, especially in modern translations that are easy to read for the average person. I'll post more about that in another thread for those who are interested. Feel free to ask any questions if you want to know more about what I've written or who I am. If you want to introduce yourself, please just reply to this email and introduce yourself in this thread. Just a reminder that if you want to start a new topic not related to introductions, please feel free to do that any time by posting a new message with a subject that reflects your topic, rather than replying to this email. Joel

Greetings everyone, I wanted to share some resources for studying the early Christian writings. Most of you are probably already aware of the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection which is available online for free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library: https://ccel.org/fathers . That collection has a lot of early Christian writings in it but the translations are pretty dated as they were all done in the 1800s. The CCEL has a few more early Christian writings on their site but all older translations. I've been working for years on cataloguing translations of the early Christian writings and making them available online. I've mostly finished cataloguing translations of the 1st and 2nd centuries. I still have a lot of work to do for the 3rd century. That catalogue is available here: http://early.xpian.info/. I've been able to find many public domain or otherwise freely available translations of early Christian writings that are either available online or could be legally put on line. I've been digitizing those that can be legally put online and putting them on the above site. I now have freely available, modern English translations of almost everything up to and including Justin's First Apology. A small group of us are working on updating older translations to make public domain modern English translations. We are also working on doing audio versions too for people who prefer listening to reading. Tommy, who is on this list, has recently completed language updates of an anonymous early Christian sermon (often called 2 Clement) and Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians into easy-to-read contemporary English. The audio is available on Tommy's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasalbinholmes2538 and on my Early Christian Sources website. He and I have been working on Shepherd of Hermas. There is a decent, public domain modern version on my site already done and Tommy has been working on an even easier to read version. I'm hoping to release Aristides's Apology in modern English shortly. My wife is working on Tertullian's "On the Veiling of Virgins" and Clement of Alexandria's "Who is the Rich Man That Is Saved". Someone else I know is working on a modern language update of a translation of Irenaeus's "Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching". If you are interested in listening to audio recordings of early Christian writings, you can find a list of what I've found on the Early Christian Sources website. A lot of them are older translations and some are not great quality recordings. I'm hoping we can get more good quality recordings online like the ones Tommy has done. If you are interested in searching early Christian writings, Richard, who is also on this list, made a website for searching the early Christian writings. It is mostly the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection, with a few others added in. I've only recently discovered his site so don't have a lot of experience with it but it seems to be a very useful resource. You can find it here: https://www.searchearlychristianwritings.online/ Many of you will have probably seen "A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs" by David Bercot. It is a useful place to start if you are interested in finding references to where early Christian writers discuss a certain topic. I think it is limited to what is in the Ante Nicene Fathers collection so there are some early Christian writings not included. It is unfortunately, copyright and can't be freely copied. It is available to borrow at The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofearl0000unse. It can be bought in paper or ebook format here: https://scrollpublishing.com/products/dictionary-of-early-christian-beliefs/ . I've considered making an open source database on early Christian references to topics that could be freely available online. If anyone is interested in that, it would be easy to do as a group project. If anyone else knows of other resources for studying the early Christian writings, please feel free to post them here. Also, if anyone is interested in working to make more of these writings freely availa

Greetings to everyone on this list, Now that we have a number of people on this list I wanted to send out an introduction before we started conversations on here. The idea behind this list was to have a place that people who are interested in the example and teaching of the early Christians could have a place to communicate. There seem to be a reasonable number of people who are intrigued by the lives and writings of the early Christians. A lot of us have been in religious environments where we were taught a certain way of understanding the Bible. As we have discovered what the writings of the early Christians from shortly after the New Testament say, it has often challenged ideas we were taught and made us rethink how we view the scriptures. We want to encourage that kind of thinking in other people. Not infrequently, when people start to read and be challenged by the early Christian writings and start to break out of the typical comfortable theology of Christendom, things can get somewhat lonely as others around get offended or uncomfortable by being challenged by new ideas. For that reason, it seems reasonable to try to encourage discussion from around the world so that people who are feeling like they are alone can find some encouragement from others who also see something in the early Christian writings that makes them want to be more faithful disciples of Jesus. There does not seem to be a good place online at the moment where those sorts of conversations are happening. In creating this list we are not just trying to encourage any discussion about early Christianity but primarily discussion that points us back to Jesus in some way. There are already places online to discuss early Christianity from a academic (and often skeptical of Christianity) perspective. We are not trying to create that here. We are also not trying to create a platform to promote a certain sect or one or two certain issues. We want to encourage everyone to view the early Christian testimony as a challenge to us when it is on track and as a warning to us too as we see how things drifted over time. We don't expect that everyone on this discussion list has to be on the same page on everything. We want people to feel free to talk openly about what the early Christians said and what the implications of those things might be. Ideally people on this discussion list should be truth-seekers who, even if we haven't figured everything out, are wanting to have a better understanding of the truth as it relates to Jesus and his teachings and are willing to go wherever the truth takes us, no matter how uncomfortable that might be. We are not trying for this discussion group to replace real-life community among Christians. We are also not trying to displace the study of the New Testament in our personal lives or together. Those things should be a higher priority to us than online discussions about the early Christian writings with people we can't have a real-life relationship with. There are a few technical points I wanted to bring up so that everyone is familiar with how this forum works. Everyone who is subscribed to this discussion group can start new topics or respond to existing ones. You may either do this via email or via the web interface at http://groups.io/ or a mix of both. If you want to reply to someone else's message, just reply as you would to any email and it will automatically go to the whole list or reply via the web interface. If you want to start a new topic of discussion, please feel free to do that but please do it by posting a new message with a new subject rather than replying to a previous message with an old subject. That will allow multiple discussions to go on at the same time without too much confusion. If you find there are too many emails from this list, you can turn off emails and just view messages through the web interface. Also, if you want, you can change your settings through the web interface just to send you a collection of new email messages lumped together. If you want to do that but don't know how, please feel free to